Target, Obama Create a Video Voyeur’s Paradise

Video voyeurs, thanks to advances in technology, can now establish high-tech peepholes virtually anywhere. Thanks to Target and President Obama, video voyeurs in alarming numbers will soon be filming our daughters in department store dressing rooms and school shower rooms.

These devices are marketed as security devices, and can be purchased dirt cheap online. They’re efficient – they’re not activated until motion detectors pick up movement. And they’re tiny – the lens on one of these cameras can be as small as the period at the end of a sentence.

These cameras can be hidden virtually anywhere, including in vents and sinks.

“[T]hese are very small cameras that can be mounted in many locations and hidden in many seemingly every-day items,” said Sheriff Rick Ramsey in a public statement.

And they are easy to use. Says private investigator Carrie Kerskie:

“Nowadays, with the advances in technology, all you need to do is insert a MicroSD card. The battery life for these coat hooks, I looked it up, is two hours. Then, you just take it out, pop it in the computer, and you have all your images.”

“It’s real simple and easy. They just walk in, hang it up, walk out, go back a few hours later and take it off.”

It is the president’s policy that male students can use whatever bathroom, dressing room, or shower room they want at school. A male entering a female shower room cannot be challenged and cannot be questioned. The same goes for Target – Target personnel are on record telling adult males they have perfect freedom to enter women’s bathrooms and fitting rooms, no questions asked.

The opportunities for mischief here are legion. A male with voyeuristic propensities can go into any bathroom, locker room, shower room, or dressing room at any Target store or any public school in America, take his own sweet time to place hidden cameras wherever he wants them, and then saunter out to collect his images at his leisure. The invasion of privacy implications here are staggering.

Target made its first Facebook post last week in over a month. The new post promoted Silly Slime Labs and Bubble Bonanzas as fun-for-the-summer products. But its Facebook site was so overwhelmed with comments critical of Target’s dangerous dressing room policy that the post was deleted almost as soon as it went up.

We at AFA have said from the beginning of our boycott of Target that the issue here is not primarily transvestites but predatory males who will take advantage of transvestite-friendly policies to gain access to areas in which our daughters deserve privacy.

We are way past the point where this danger is merely theoretical. The African-American head of the Georgia ACLU, Maya Dillard Smith, resigned her post this week after her two elementary-school age daughters were traumatized by encountering three men in a public restroom.

Ms. Smith is highly educated and intelligent. She has a degree in economics from Berkeley, and a master’s degree from Harvard, which means she cannot be dismissed as some kind of rightwing yahoo.

Here is her account:

I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.

She went on to say that the ACLU has become, not an organization that defends the rights of everyone, but an organization dedicated only to the promotion of “certain progressive rights.” Her daughters’ experience is a case in point. Where is the concern for her daughters’ right to privacy, which according to the left has been the premiere civil right since the 1960s?

The left has screeched for 50 plus years now about how sacrosanct the “right to privacy” is. They constantly bleat about how the government must stay out of everybody’s bedroom, and yet now they insist that the government force its way into every bathroom, locker room, and shower room in the country.

Said the president, “Look, I have profound respect for everybody’s religious beliefs on this, but if you’re in a public school the question is how do we just make sure that children are treated with kindness. That’s all. My reading of Scripture tells me that that Golden Rule is pretty high up there in terms of my Christian belief. … As president of the United States, those are the values that I think are important.”

Fine. The Golden Rule teaches us “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). For openers, what we wish is that grown men would not invade the private spaces of our young daughters, and we promise, in honor of Christ’s teaching, to do the same in return. We’ll stay out of your little girls’ spaces and we’ll expect and insist that you stay out of ours. How would that be, Mr. President?

Bottom line: President Obama and Target have turned America’s schools and department stores into a video voyeur’s paradise. Both the president and Target are on the wrong side of Jesus, the wrong side of right, and the wrong side of history on this one.

(Unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Family Association or American Family Radio.)

Bryan Fischer is the Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association, where he provides expertise on a range of public policy topics. Described by the New York Times as a "talk-radio natural," he hosts the "Focal Point" radio program on AFR Talk,which airs live on weekdays from 1-3 p.m. Central on American Family Radio's nationwide talk network of 125 stations.
A graduate of Stanford University and Dallas Theological Seminary, Bryan pastored in Idaho for 25 years, during which time he served for one session as the chaplain of the Idaho state senate. He founded the Idaho Values Alliance in 2005, and is a co-author of Idaho's marriage amendment. He has been with AFA since 2009.
In his role as a spokesman for AFA, he has been featured on media outlets such as Fox News, CBS News, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Russia Today television and the Associated Press, has been a frequent guest on talk radio to discuss cultural and religious issues. He has been profiled in publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and BuzzFeed. He has been married to his bride, Debbie, since 1976, and they have two grown children.

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